Secret Life

Miles and Rosalie, a couple of about 60, give a dinner for Tara and Bruce, a couple of about 30, who will soon be married. The conversation ranges from the short story Tara has just published (“Secret Life”) to house-shopping to seeking Shakespeare in modern London. In the course of the evening, particularly while some vintage poetry is bandied about, a kind of bond forms between Miles and Tara that will shake the foundations of both couples.

The facts are these: Tara calls off the wedding and appears at Miles’s regular lunchtime coffee shop and declares him to be her soulmate. Rosalie learns that Tara has a history of psychiatric hospitalizations and has backed out of a previous engagement. Tara meets with Bruce to return his engagement ring, but the ring box she hands him before slipping away is empty.

But facts are not the only things at work in a situation like this. Stories are told – about Miles and Rosalie’s unconventional romance, about plans for the future and interpretations of the past – and the lives of these people become caught up in a gnarled web of imagination and aspiration, identity and destiny, passion and resignation, poetry and prose.